Behind the Wells of Light
by aragonite
Summary: Very gloomy, introspective piece that isn't my usual cup. Watson's POV for his new home, his new friend, and his new realization on life. Mentions of drug use, as well as the factors that encourage them, quite a bit of angst, character death. COMPLETE


Behind the Wells of Light

_This is dark, moody, and introspective. A request from a friend, handily co-inciding with a spate of insomnia..And still dealing with a lot of stress on the personal line, so perhaps this was a welcome distraction...  
_

It started in small steps.

Watson hadn't realized how his thinking had been affected by the worst of his experiences until he looked back and read his own words. Why had he given Gregson an impression of bloated paleness? Why had he all but implied Lestrade was untrustworthy?

His natural instincts were to find the answer, but even as he tried, he knew he already knew the truth, and it was an ugly one.

In the weeks of their new friendship, he had been bitter about Holmes' ability to maneuver throughout the city. While he had been trapped with his lingering illness, forced to experience London through the glass, Holmes had been free to come and go as he pleased. He of course had no inclination to hold back his own profession to coddle a sick veteran from the most disgraceful of wars—so disgraceful that in his worst nightmares he imagined the survivors lined up and humiliated before the Crown for failure to bring about the victory needed.

In a way, he had punished himself. Rather than return home in his shame, he had chosen London. That was an exile in itself, a city to be lost in, to be buried beneath the sheer numbers. To become one of the millions hiding beneath a curtain of London fog. The greasy London fog swirled its yellow path of contagion through the streets. It twirled with silent menace into every crevice of the city…and hours would pass as he watched the oily patterns slide down on the glass. It caught on the imperfections of the glazing, and piled up in the tiny ledges of the panes. Never had he known a dirtier city…and in a way it was fitting, for he belonged in such a place. The cool, rocky forests and bracing sea-waves of his boyhood belonged to the firm in body, mind, and spirit.

It was like watching a contagion coil upon a single organism. He envied the constitution and the will of those who could be out in those sunless streets, moving with impunity against a force that would attack his weakened constitution.

Logic and emotion. Head and heart. His head had understood Holmes had a reason for leaving their rooms. Who wouldn't if he had the power? But his heart had tentatively grown to encompass the strange, magnetic man in friendship…and in his absence, the loneliness of his lost family, lost friendships, and the lost camaraderie of his soldiers swelled up hundredfold.

Watson tried burying himself in words. He did his best to renew his interest in language and even took a stab at writing, but he felt flat and dull, and the paper stayed blank on his desk, mocking him to make something with it.

He had been an athlete once. He had played for Blackheath. He had excelled in sports. He had been a good shot before the military. He had passed his exams and his training with honors…honors he had worked for, burning midnight oil and sacrificing his own sleep in the knowledge one never gained back a lost day. He'd sworn fealty to whatever gods had favored accomplishment, and now he was so unworthy he could not even light a candle on their altars. The paper mocked him in that, too.

Holmes was everything he'd warned as a lodger, and more. But in the same light, he was a blessing. No ordinary man would have taken his attention so thoroughly. Being infuriating, maddening, and compelling was an unexpected benefit, for it undeniably captured the attention and created a distraction from himself.

Holmes was a peculiar man; he had peculiar habits. He seemed to need the rigid order of a set schedule—of sorts. His habits were peculiar, but he could not live without them. And gradually, his new lodger became one of his habits, as surely as he needed a particular hour in which to rise, and a particular pipe to express his moods.

He learned by degrees that the oldest objects were the ones Holmes needed the most. It was his tattered mouse-colored dressing-gown that he wore when a new one hung clean in the closet. It was the ugliest, oldest and worst-looking pipe of the lot that he chose when he was feeling good. And his violin, as old as any Strad, was his most precious and well-loved possession.

But despite all the milestones of understanding between them, there was one about Holmes that loomed between them like a chasm. The dull, stupid spells of inaction, where he appeared paralyzed by his own mind, or worse, crushed by it. A distraction was usually the only thing that could heal this massive travail.

A part of Watson grew as resentful of these periods as much as they concerned him. After all…he had the wish to be out in the world, but his body would not let him. Holmes had the reverse problem, and for all his mental gifts, appeared to be ruled by his mind, not the other way around.

Surely his mind could be urged along to a better state of health between mind and spirit…surely it only needed some encouragement.

And it was something to do.

And when Gregson asked him to come, Holmes reacted just as he feared: to give up, mock, and flip it all aside, giving up before he even started; the frozen black mood that stymied his own efforts in his career.

What must it be like, to know what you want to do with your life so absolutely, to make a career with your gifts…only to have another piece of yourself attack you with lassitude and bitterness when you cannot fight it off?

"But he begs you to help him!"

A milestone only to those who knew Holmes—and not a milestone that occurred to Watson just yet. Persuasion was a wily thing, with few results on the detective.

But persuasion from Watson's mouth…worked.

It must have been the honesty in his fiber. To not be able to do something when asked was unthinkable.

And so, on Holmes' capitulation, Watson entered London again…and for the very first time. It was a London all men suspected, but few truly encountered.

His journey was on Holmes' ticket. Perhaps even then he was chafing at the bit at the same time he wallowed in his new freedom. But the colors were sharper, the beauties greater…the horrors matchless. For a man who was hungry to live again, he had been sequestered far too long. Every human flaw magnified in his absence from the masses. The police were dull and stupid as Holmes said. The emotions were tangled and erratic, infuriating and wasteful. Then the further the case sunk into humanity, the more absorbing it grew for them both. Holmes made the most basic of errors right after scolding a policeman for his.

Another milestone, that Holmes confided his flaws to him, but not to the police. They were closer after that point…and by just another notch, Watson felt himself drawn deeper into Holmes' private world.

It would never be his to achieve. Holmes' mind was too glittering, too strong, too…much. But Watson could explore what he could and enjoy the experience, the way a man is proud of swimming above sea-waters too deep to dive.

Holmes was far worth the venture. His mind was as restless as the coils of fog against the glass…but nowhere near as slow. No study of his thoughts were predictable, and too many times his mind moved with the speed of a turbine. Watson thought of him as the Flying Scotsman barreling through the night, lamps a-blaze, piercing the night and the fog with a scream of triumph to its destination—the conclusion of a case wrapped in the fog of mystery and crime. Holmes' eyes, grey and alive, were wells of light, and shone all the brighter for what lay behind those wells could be as dark and distant as a London Night. It was a fitting analogy, for Holmes' eyes were his intellect, shining in the dark of London the way the lamps illuminated the swallowing fog of the city. Illuminated. A word for light, epiphany, civilisation...intelligence...and enlightenment. There was no better word for what Sherlock Holmes was and what he did.

But was the fog-times Watson dreaded. When Holmes lay upon the couch with all the lifelessness of a corpse, and the thick shag smoke coiled and curled into the atmosphere…Watson would watch as the smoke stroked against their side of the window-glass, and on the other, the sinister yellow fog tried to reach in misty friendship. It worried him like nothing else; for something intangible rested in the air on these nights, unspoken with a promise of suffering.

He would open the window to let the shag out…when he had to. But it was a struggle to breach the fortress he was working to create of warmth, and light, and civilization and sanity…the chill damp of the fog would rush in, briefly, but air came with it, and when there was enough he would shut the window against it all, and the fog would recoil, its broken fingers left behind in the sitting room. Something between his shoulders would un-knot at those times, as if he'd watched something fail to happen.

He did not like the fog that Holmes so loved, for Holmes appeared to commune and bond to the phenomena with the understanding a dying man has of disease…if that wasn't putting it too baldly. He sulked when mortal man fled the creeping damp. He pouted when no one used the simple cover like they ought to in committing crimes worthy of his notice. That it was unhealthy to be out…well, how could a man so skilled at ignoring his own body be expected to lower his mind to baser planes?

Forgiveness came with understanding. And Holmes required a great deal of understanding, for he was simply so complex.

Over time, they each shifted and grew into mutual understandings. The least expected one was the mechanism that freed Holmes' mind from its prison: a small grain-packet of cocaine mixed twice or thrice daily in pure solution. Watson witnessed the realization in deep disbelief at first: Holmes was so clean, cleaner than most human beings even in the hospitals, that the notion that he was polluting himself with an outside substance was for the alienists.

There was no denying the facts. With the weak solution, Holmes was finally free from the pull of his couch and able to focus on his cases. Cajoling and begging were no longer needed, and something echoed under the surface of Watson's epiphany, that a simple chemical from South America had replaced his personal, hard-worked efforts to see Holmes' potential bloom.

He was jealous of the drug. He was jealous of the drug for the same reason why he was jealous of Gregson and Lestrade; they belonged to a world Holmes skirted, danced with, and visited with a confidence to be envied. Watson did not claim such skill. His life had been spent being upright and honest; his life had been clear light, warm fires, the comfort of hot food and steaming tea within a sheltering box of patterned wallpaper and carpet and shining brass fixtures. The straight and narrow world of honesty and integrity was built along those lines, and boxed-in from the outside with wall and windowglass.

_They_ were on the other side of that glass, another aspect of the slow-swirling, menacing fog that promised threats and obscured the light of day. They walked in it; Holmes out of his natural needs and compulsions, for his Art meant everything and that meant _living_ in the criminal world. The Inspectors walked in it for different reasons: it was their career, their chosen life and they plodded through those dark streets of cobblestone and weeping blue brick. Holmes did it to seek out crime. These plain-clothed men did it because in order to help, _help must first be there_. They were little different from the slow, plodding constables who walked miles in badly-fitting shoes, with a single bull's-eye lantern to stand up against the pitiful hiss of the gaslights that danced against the fog like light made of white water. On occasion, they paused at the red lamp of a private practitioner, and the emblem of healing cast the colour of blood into the fog, until a great red wound seeped throughout the night.

His own anger shamed him, but shame does not dissolve rage. It mixes badly, like morphine into cocaine. He never took the shame of drugs; it was not worth the candle, nor was it something he could risk. His body was broken and only half-familiar to himself. He watched London from the inside of his rooms, but at the same time, he watched London from the outside, and from afar. He was distant and remote in long tracts of existence as his illness coiled within his soul. Not that life felt any less real to him; but his own importance faltered.

All his life he'd been of use to someone…and now, he was barely of use to _himself_. A stranger peered back at him in the translucent mirror of window and fog. A stranger devoured by illness phantoms while another, chill spectre swirled inches away from his fingertips. Himself. John H. Watson was changed, and who was he becoming now?

A man is worthless if he is not of use. What is a man if he does not have his own place among his fellow men, if he cannot contribute in some way?

He had the good sense not to write _that_ down with the rest of his thoughts at night. But surely Holmes, with his mental powers, would be able to read it anyway? With the depth of the ink and pencil into the paper, or the regularity of angry underscores of words that could be seen as revealing?

Holmes was the only lifeline he had to re-learning his sense of self.

It started out in small steps. Something to do, something constructive and worthwhile to take his mind away from his body while his body healed. That Holmes was in need of his own form of help made it simple—even logical.

But brilliance cannot be met with a lesser intellect. It can only be complemented by another quality. Watson was slow to learn his own talents within that area; slowest to realize he might have a gift as strange and marvelous to Holmes as Holmes was to himself.

Patience was required. For both of them.

And over time, in small steps, like a policeman stepping through the fogged night with his tiny lantern…Watson began to see through the shrouded streets. A stone through mist; his gaze grew more developed. His constitution rallied by degrees.

But his inevitable growth went alongside change. It was while he was at the threshold of his own recovery that he learnt of Holmes' first experimentation with the cocaine. At first it was nothing to be alarmed at; all physicians practiced self-experimentation upon themselves—the scrupulous ones did, at any rate—how better to know the effects of a drug upon the people who trusted them for aid?

But the tiny flicker of concern upon seeing the bill from the chemist was stifled carefully. Holmes was not a man of medicine; he was a man of chemistry. _Organic_ chemistry. His fascination with all poisons and alkaloids and altering substances ensured this new addition to the chemistry-table by the window was not out of character, or a step out of pattern.

It was years before the enforced vacation at Cornwall, and not long before he would start searching for poor Whitney in the opium dens. But still something made Watson avoid both magnets. He read the ads as well as the next man of letters, but that something, that intangible quality that was the amusement and puzzlement of Holmes…that _something_ stayed his hand from self-experimentation. If he was in pain, it never quite occurred to him to take something past a mild powder of salicylic acid—barely stronger than the willowbark tea of his ancestors that led to the distillation.

He was a remarkable man, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street. A man of intellect so high that he never completely understood how high he was against the masses. That lack of understanding led to his worst qualities: his impatience, depression, cynicism, his occasional anger, annoyance and contempt. So sure of his methods, Holmes never understood why so few people could follow him, or believe in him blindly over the conventional, plodding methods that 'made do' for so long. "Elementary," he explained it all away. "Very simple." "A child could do it." "Simplicity itself." "hardly worthwhile." And the phrases, initially calculated in a strange form of reassurance, had the opposite affect by driving away those who came to him for help, for no man has limitless humility, and is content with being condescended to as part of the price for asking for help.

And it was the policemen Watson initially resented, Fat-handed Gregson and sly, shifty-faced Lestrade, who continued to consult when no one else would. If Holmes likened them to a pair of jealous beauty queens, but Holmes was the diva of London; a soothsayer who told you the future even as he scolded you for not knowing it himself. And slowly, Watson came to see how these visits were important to all of them—even himself.

He was a remarkable man, Dr. John H. Watson of 221B Baker Street. A man of intuition and impressions that operated on a barely human plane of existence, a man who could use logic to the extent that once he understood the cogs that operated behind a man, he could withstand the risks of their company despite the emotional gunfire. He was a man who could see the ordinary within the remarkable, and also take the remarkable and render it into words a common mind could read. He was a translator of the amazing, and it remained amazing with his telling. His strength was so past the lines of normality that while he wrote away the evenings of cases present and past, he never knew that the same level of awe was directed his way.

The steps stretched down the streets, through the London Fog, and from Baker Street the steps passed into weeks, months, and years. The fog in his soul dissipated; in contrast, the streets of London grew less wholly dangerous. Watson felt the city was less a morass rendered callous by its sheer numbers, and more like a living, thriving organism carrying its own form of intelligence. The streets were the pathways of the organism, as vital as the blood vessels were his. Here each man was a molecule, carrying some task, some function to the whole.

All roads led to Rome; all streets led to London, and all worried steps led to Holmes. It was a way of the world, the way of a new, exciting era where crime was a science to be taken apart and put back together clean. Cases were solved, held up as examples…and delighted in. The sunlight pierced the fog-bank with the return of Watson's practice, and the rising reputation of Holmes' work. Watson noted that some members of the force did not come often to Baker Street, if at all, but the rising number of the wealthier clients who had problems that did not precisely require a policeman's badge or arrest warrant…those were becoming more common, and they were far more lucrative.

More sunlight came to earth and split into the hundreds of candles that lit the wedding-ceremony between himself and Mary Morstan. For a moment in time, Paradise itself was borrowed for the occasion, for Holmes attended voluntarily, and the gleam in those grey eyes was for once lacking in ulterior thought. He was regarding his friend as though he had never _quite_ realized the pleasantness of the activity.

The streets opened between home and hearth, practice, friendships, and duties. The streets walked into years, and Holmes was a familiar habit, one he knew was there…one who visited rarely because he had always been a very busy man, and only twice did Watson recall Holmes ever "visiting" someone just to see them. Their streets diverged now; their lives were more separate yet the ties between were still there, tugging every now and then as if to remind them they had once lived in a way that created a single unit; an organism that created sum totals of success against misery.

And Holmes was busier than ever; his name rose and fell with the seasons; and when the rooms stood empty in the night, Watson knew it was because he was out and away on a case. It was strange to look from the street into the window he'd once peered out of, and from the cobblestones it was a very different feeling indeed. Now he could see how so much brighter the lights glowed; how sharp and strong against a weak, chill and slow-moving fog.

There were nights when the silhouette moved back and forth, and cases were read of in the papers. A royal affair; a request from one government or another. The gratitude of a shipping-line. The request of a country…or a missing child found hale and hearty. Other times the papers revealed all by not saying things in particular, but there were too many times when Holmes paced before the window, or was absent, coinciding with peculiar news-items such as the strange return of a stolen jewel, or a noble afflicted with amnesia and mysteriously discovered within a mile of his own home. Holmes would wear affections of his clients upon his cuffs; his throat; he used a snuffbox that was a gift; he grew comfortable in his possessions, and Watson was content and happy enough with his own life that he made the mistake of thinking Holmes had come into his being the same way he had with his medicine and wife. Work meant so much to his friend; it would seem that he had come into a place in life where he could live contentedly within a sphere of his own making.

A happy man forgets sorrow, and a secure man forgets fears. And Watson had never completely suffered the depths of self-imprisonment the way Holmes had suffered. He had risen above the new and permanent restrictions upon the body he had once been so proud of…but Holmes had never been concerned so much about the body—his organism was the brain. And the brain was a hard thing to master.

The physical comforts given to him by grateful clients had never meant quite so much to him, except what they symbolized: the recognition of his efforts and his successes. For Holmes could be vain, but that vanity was rooted in the lack of recognition and gratitude in the past. Too late, Watson realized the bitterness of those lean years could return on his friend, just like the bitterness of his wounds and the death of his first dream of a military career came back to face _him_.

The cocaine grew in frequency.

The cocaine grew within him.

Moriarty happened.

Despite the pain that split his heart, Watson had to remember that Holmes had died the way he had chosen; just as he had lived his life. And the clinical physician within him sought comfort in facts, and the quiet, cool whisper in his mind pointed out the slight signs of psychosis and increasingly irrational behavior when Holmes was not on a case. In the road-map that was London the organism, a defender of the body against the fog could not stand fast forever. And Holmes had been alone for too long. It was miracle enough that Watson had been with him up until the last half-hour of his life.

Where were the thanks of kings and queens, when no one of import appeared at the small chapel? Where were the affectations and labels? Very busy men and women they were, managing affairs of the state, that they could not remember the work of a man they themselves admitted, "saved their names," their reputations, their children.

It was the police who packed the church, met him at the train, and drowned the memorial stone in flowers. Police still filthy from duty, eyes tired and full of soot and dust. Two of them had a bad cough they tried to stifle in their sleeves, and out of honor he took them aside later with a cough-syrup. One constable showed up with his arm still in a sling, his eyes bright from pain-killers. He nodded off several times, and his friends wordlessly propped him between their bodies. Watson never learnt the man's name…or what had happened…or most of all, why had Holmes been so important to this lowly Constable that he had crawled out of a hospital to attend his funeral?

It was almost enough to let him forget the true nature of the fog: what it lacked in physical power, it made up for in sheer size. It was all over London. _It was London_. Mary died; the fog killed her, because it hid the disease, and the coughing, and the blood…and the candles in his life guttered to near-extinction. He had forgotten how the fog had outnumbered those small, strong lights. It swirled in his soul now, with no recognition between day or night.

He kept to his practice; he kept to his streets out of rote, for to die or allow himself neglect would insult the two people who loved him best. And the fog crept against the glass of his empty house, waiting to enter the rest of the way. He ignored it. He drew the curtains against its weeping chill and turned his back to the way it dripped yellow slime down to the sill and spread damp as far as it could under the thin cracks. He was a doctor; he still had purpose—in the eyes of others if not in himself. But he became a changed man. He kept his hours along his private practice, but his hours at the hospital were moved completely to the night.

What he was trying to learn, or prove, or come to terms with…he didn't know. It was a strange sort of peace to be walking along by himself with only his revolver for a companion, and the click of his shoes upon the pavement was soothing in a way he had not expected. He found he preferred to walk away from the bleeding red halos of the surgeries. He passed through the softly hissing islets of the gas-lamps while the Thames whispered almost as gently. The organism was half-asleep on these walks. London dozed, its dramas lowered and saved for the light of day.

He came upon Lestrade then, at the accumulation of twelve years' acquaintance. No motion had been made to his foot-falls, no reaction as the small man watched the fog play at the string of lamps wreathed like a hissing necklace around the lines of St. Bartholomew's. Like lamps his eyes burned, fueled from lack of sleep.

For the first time in Watson's experience, Lestrade ignored his appearance. His coat was battered and rumpled; a disturbing stain rested at his shoulder that the doctor and soldier could identify in his sleep. His hat hung in his hands as his dark eyes stared into London and nothing else. Watson knew grief and anguish when he saw it; felt its echo for its own.

"I'm sure he'll be all right, Lestrade." He said it gently enough, but when those eyes looked up, it was like staring into pools of misery.

"It was bound to happen eventually," the little man said brokenly, and his smile was warped. Trying to put on a brave front, which touched Watson all the more because this was his rival fighting for his life in a hospital that had just been attacked by the government for its lack of cleanliness. "He was getting too close to Saffron Hill. It's dangerous for any copper over there…especially now."

There isn't much room, but Watson found enough for them to share the space. "Gregson's a stubborn man, you know that. He'll pull through."

"He will or he won't." Lestrade stared blankly into the fog again. "We're not getting any younger…and…it's all changing again. A man can't change with the times every time…sooner or later he gets out-moded…or obsolete."

"You sound like you're machines, not men!" Watson tried to chivvy his spirits with a low laugh. "When have you ever given up, Lestrade? Holmes himself swore you were incapable."

"Giving up? No." The little detective let his head swing from side to side. "But there comes a time when you know the sands are running out of the glass. That's when you have to be extra careful…can't die before you're ready…that's the plan, anyway. We know not the hour or the day." He sighed. "A doctor can always practice, so long as he's able. A copper can't say the same. Look at Gregson. He's one of the last of us…if he gets pulled…or dies…that's one less of the old guard out there. And you can't replace that sort of experience…" He stopped to rub at his eyes. "His cases will probably go to Hopkins." Was the mutter. "Hopkins can read his awful hand…"

And Watson had nothing he could say. For a man who treasured words like food and drink…there were too many times when only silence could speak. Holmes had said that was a rare gift; Watson still didn't know what that meant. So he did what he knew, and waited in the darkness.

"It's always quiet this time of night." Lestrade said so quietly, and yet so unexpectedly, Watson almost jumped inside his coat. He followed the little man's gaze; it was on the slow-dancing fog again. "We started out at night…that's how they know if you've got what it takes. A lot of us were killed in the first five years. The fog killed us."

"I…I didn't know that." Watson thought he meant the diseases of the lung that came with the fog.

"They'd hide in the fog, you know." Lestrade spoke casually, his conversation so calm and matter of fact that Watson could feel each hair stand up, one by one, on the nape of his neck. "It was easy to lie in wait against the river. Our lanterns told them where we were…where we were going…and that close to a lantern, you can't really see much past the glare. They could hear our boots, too. A lot of us didn't have the whistles…those silly rattles didn't carry a call for help for any decent distance, I can tell you that." He toyed with the hat in his hands without being aware of it. His whole awareness was focused on the fog. "You'd trip over the corpse before you even knew it was there. Or smell it. Even in the winter, you'd smell someone drowned in the gin. How could you not contaminate the scene of the crime?" He shrugged as if to himself. "There'd be times when we wouldn't see the sun for months on end…the fog was in the way. By the time we met you, I think we were becoming a part of the fog…I was yellow as sulphur…and Gregson was white as a mushroom."

"Has it not gotten better for you, Inspector?" Watson whispered.

"Better?" Lestrade didn't understand. He blinked several times, and glanced twice at Watson. "We have a better system now…if that's what you mean…"

"I mean…are you not safer now than you were back then?"

"Oh." Was the quiet answer. "I see." He hesitated, but the honesty had been cracked, and there was nothing but to let it all out. "We're not safer, no. Suicides are up again among the force. One thing to walk the beat or risk one's reputation on a murder no one wants to touch, you know…we're only human. Sometimes a man can't take the pressure of doing his job, and coming in to the station for another round of abuse from the chiefs. That's what causes most of the self-murders, you know. Just the way we're treated by our own people…"

"I'm sorry." Watson has no idea what else he could say. "But you have a reputation, Lestrade. You and Gregson are the best of the lot."

"You're only saying that because Mr. Holmes said that."

"And he said it because it's true."

But Lestrade only smiled wearily, and shook his head again. The fog swirled away from him briefly, before re-settling about them.

"Might have been true to him, but that doesn't make it true to the Home Office."

"Lestrade…if the Office didn't believe in you, why did they give you permission to carry a gun? Hardly any policeman has that honor."

"Honor?" The small man repeated, as if surprised again. He slowly fell into silence again; the fog took their attention as it shifted among the lights.

"You met Holmes after the Threadneedle Murders."

"I don't recall Holmes ever mentioning it."

"Ugly case." Lestrade glanced down at his fingernails, which were clean. "Man killed his rival by arranging his promotion in the local bank. Poor boy was a sensitive, worried sort. The responsibility of his new post crushed him like an ant. Nothing we could ever really prove." He shrugged. "A policeman permitted to bear arms is a stick of dynamite waiting to go off."

"Forgive me, but you haven't…"gone off" thus far."

"Certainly not. How could I let Gregson win the post as best by default?" Lestrade stood up then, too cheerful against the watery lamps. "With that in mind, I ought to remind him he's not getting out of that so easily. Are you working tonight, Watson?"

Watson stood too. He had known Lestrade for twelve years, but he wasn't certain if he had actually known any policeman until now. "Yes." He answered to many questions. "It just so happens, I am."

"Silly question, actually." Lestrade said almost to himself as he picked up his walking-stick. He struck it against the pavement, and the sound made a low, cracking sound; a declaration of defiance or of war to the things that used the fog to hide in. "This is London. When are we ever not working?"

"When…indeed…" Watson murmured.

They walked through the smoky curtain together, and like it always did, the fog parted ways before them. It was larger than they were, and ultimately more powerful, but it had no substance on its own...it needed man for that, Watson thought as he held open the door.


End file.
